PYV Summer Camp 2017 – Day Six. New Year’s Day 2018

Just how much sleep did everyone get? Who knows! I know that I was talking to a group of boys a bit before 2.00am assuring them that I would be waking them up in the morning. But while they were packing their stuff at 5.45am, they woke me up! Unintentionally, of course.

Today is the final day of camp, and so it will be a shorter day as we prepare for camp to finish at 2.00pm. But it will be a full day nonetheless.

The final leader's meeting

Our leaders were awake and together at 7.30am, which is a fair effort after a very late night. Why would they do this? I think I’ve already answered that question, but it is just another sign of their desire to serve the teenagers of your church and family.

Breakfast, which was pancakes, was followed by everyone’s favourite activity – the dorm room pack up. At this time at every camp, I wonder what lost property will end up in the PYV office. Will there be any this time? Of course there will (insert grumpy face here). With the pack up mostly done, we headed into our session room for the final worship session of camp.

This included a testimony from one of our YouthMETRO trainees, Celia Yu. Once again, it was a wonderful testimony that was an encouragement for all of us. Which leads me to write about the YouthMETRO trainees. This year we have 13 trainees who have spent the camp time discussing theology with Matt Deroon and evangelism with Nate Barbieri. They arrived as acquaintances and left as friends. We have seen good fruit from YouthMETRO over a number of years. I believe we will also see good fruit from this group too.

YouthMETRO 2018

Pete’s final talk took us back to what we have learned over the camp with short discussions about these topics. These topics have been having an impact on the campers and leaders and it was good to hear some of that being made clear in this session. Please, if you have a child who has attended the camp, please talk with them about the topics of relationships.

After lunch we had our final session which was a chance for us all to say thank you to the camp leaders and, importantly, the camp executive team. These leaders have worked hard for many months to get things ready for camp, and they have worked hard over six days. They deserve more than they have been given.

I hope to have more photos from the camp on the PYV Facebook page by the end of the week. There are a lot of photos to go through and determine which ones to make public. We will also have the photos of the lost property for you to look through. Except for the blue socks. Lost socks get binned.

Thank you for taking the time to read through these blog posts over this week. I have been encouraged by those who have told me they were reading it.